She would time her routine so that it would not conflict with therapy sessions, work details, meal breaks, communal exercise. She would be a model patient – or prisoner – whichever it was she was supposed to be in this place. They would let her out one day. Not for a long time, perhaps, but she would convince them she was healed and no longer a danger. That she had, once more, become someone else.
One thing that Andrea had learned during her earliest days of bodybuilding was that to focus your body you had to focus your mind. Set a goal. Concentrate on it. She clenched her teeth as the final repetitions of her set strained her arms. When she had first started, it had been the face of the Karneval clown who had beaten and raped her, half-strangling her with a necktie. She had burned that image into her mind with each exercise, every day for seven years. It had given her the focus that she had needed.
But now she had another focus. With each push-up she repeated in her head a new mantra: the words she would say into herself with every exercise, every day of her confinement.
Jan Fabel.